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Topic: CD-Quality Video-Game Music Revisited (Read 387 times)

As many know I have been working on creating modern high-quality versions of songs from many Nintendo 64 games. These are all the actual songs from the games (not from the CD or USF, nor are they remixes).My goal here is to be completely faithful to the original songs, but to produce the highest-quality versions so we can enjoy them in very crisp and clear detail.

I would like to do the same thing with Final Fantasy VII. Has anyone made a "best and most accurate" set of samples, MIDI files, and bank data for Final Fantasy VII? The original PC release had some problems in that department and I didn't see this exact thing in the audio section here.

You've pasted your links wrong. All of them got truncated in the middle with rogue ellipses inserted in their stead. Did you copy this from a post on another forum? If so, it's better to copy the post's source than the final rendered post, because many boards have a tendency to shorten URLs for display.

This is great work. Never heard Star Fox 64 sound as good! Could you possibly do Ogre Battle 64? I'd loved to hear it in HQ too.

Another question. Would it be feasible to apply this same technique to GBA games? All the GBA soundtracks are spoiled by the compressed samples which causes hissing. To hear GBA music in HQ would be remarkable.

I believe I can do this for GameBoy Advance, Nintendo DS, Nintendo 3DS, etc., and do have plans to look into it.To do any given game I will need a copy of the game in some form. Ogre Battle 64 is not a game I have.

To be 1,000% clear, these are the actual samples from the PlayStation version? And all the SoundFont parameters (pan, vibrato, fade times, etc.) are correct?How does this compare to the SoundFonts used in the old PC version by Eidos?

How compatible are these with the PC SoundFont MIDI files? Don’t the PC MIDI files have tracks missing and other alterations? So shouldn’t I need a PlayStation rip of the MIDI as well, or are the PC versions good?

GBA is really, REALLY weird for audio. It's got six sound channels. Four are literally chiptune stuff such as square waves carried over from the GB, present for backwards-compatibility, but also used in several GBA games. The other two channels don't have any sequencing capability. Rather, they are fed an audio stream from the CPU, which handles all sequencing and sample-based mixing in software. This means a few things:

There is no guaranteed, defined format for music. A lot of games use the "Sappy" engine for mixing music, and it's well enough documented that it's not too hard to rip its samples and sequences, and then reassemble it in a modern DAW for higher quality. But a lot of games don't, and a lot of games' sound engines are not really understood or documented (or in many cases even begun to be researched, if it's a game nobody cares about). There is no consistent format like you'll see on other systems.

Games that use the holdover GB audio channels don't have samples to rip, making accurate reproduction of their particular square waves, noise waves, etc. more challenging. Not impossible, as emulators have done a generally good job, but it does create substantially more effort for someone trying to recreate songs than sample-based music would have.

Several games use GB audio and GBA sample audio in tandem, which means all of the challenges of each individual type of audio, plus the added challenge of mixing them together and getting volumes right. This can be easier or harder depending on the sound engine in use.